Reducing Risks Through Emissions Mitigation

Avoided or Reduced Impacts Due to Mitigation

Many climate change impacts and associated economic damages in the United States can be substantially reduced over the course of the 21st century through global-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, though the magnitude and timing of avoided risks vary by sector and region. The effect of near-term emissions mitigation on reducing risks is expected to become apparent by mid-century and grow substantially thereafter.

Many climate change impacts in the United States can be substantially reduced over the course of the 21st century through global-scale reductions in GHG emissions (Figure 29.2). While the difference in climate impact outcomes between different scenarios is more modest through the first half of the century,6 the effect of mitigation in avoiding climate change impacts typically becomes clear by 2050 and increases substantially in magnitude thereafter.2,3,4 For some sectors, this creates large projected benefits of mitigation. For example, by the end of the century, reduced climate change under a lower scenario (RCP4.5) compared to a higher one (RCP8.5) avoids (overall) thousands to tens of thousands of deaths per year from extreme temperatures (Ch. 14: Human Health),2,3,5 hundreds to thousands of deaths per year from poor air quality (Ch. 13: Air Quality),2,72 and the annual loss of hundreds of millions of labor hours from extreme temperatures.2,3 When monetized, each of these avoided health impacts represents domestic economic benefits of mitigation on the order of tens to hundreds of billions of dollars per year.2,3,73 For example, Figure 29.2 shows that reduced emissions under RCP4.5 can avoid approximately 48% (or $75 billion) of the $155 billion in lost wages per year by 2090 due to the effects of extreme temperature on labor (for example, outdoor industries reducing total labor hours during heat waves). Looking at the economy as a whole, mitigation can substantially reduce damages while also narrowing the uncertainty in potential adverse impacts (Figure 29.3).

Figure 29.3: The left graph shows the observed and projected changes in fossil fuel and industrial emissions of CO2 from human activities (emissions from land-use change do not appear in the figure; within the RCPs these emissions are less than 1 GtC per year by 2020 and fall thereafter). The right graph shows projections of direct damage to the current U.S. economy for six impact sectors (agriculture, crime, coasts, energy, heat mortality, and labor) as a function of global average temperature change (represented as average for 2080–2099 compared to 1980–2010). Compared to RCP8.5, lower temperatures due to mitigation under either of the lower scenarios (RCP2.6 or RCP4.5) substantially reduce median damages (dots) to the U.S. economy while also narrowing the uncertainty in potential adverse impacts. Dot-whiskers indicate the uncertainty in direct damages in 2090 (average of 2080–2099) derived from multiple combinations of climate models and forcing scenarios (dot, median; thick line, inner 66% credible interval; thin line, inner 90%). The gray shaded area represents the 90% confidence interval in the fit (black line) to the damage estimates. Damage estimates only capture adaptation to the extent that populations employed them in the historical period. Sources: (left) adapted from Wuebbles et al. 2017; 83 (right) adapted from Hsiang et al. 20173 and republished with permission of American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Many impacts have significant societal or cultural values, such as impacts to freshwater recreational fishing. However, estimating the full value of these changes remains a challenge. Recent studies highlight that climate change can disproportionately affect socially vulnerable communities, with mitigation providing substantial risk reduction for these populations.3,74,75,76 Some analyses also suggest that findings are sensitive to assumptions regarding adaptive capacity and socioeconomic change.5,71,77 In general, studies find that reduced damages due to mitigation also reduce the potential level of adaptation needed.2,78 As for socioeconomic change, increasing population growth can compound the damages occurring from climate change.4,79 Some studies have shown that impacts can be more sensitive to demographic and economic conditions than to the differences in future climates between the scenarios.80 See the Scenario Products section of Appendix 3 for more detail on population and land-use scenarios developed for the Fourth National Climate Assessment (NCA4).

For other sectors, such as impacts to coastal development, the effect of mitigation emerges more toward the end of the century due to lags in the response of ice sheets and oceans to warming (Ch. 8: Coastal).81 This results in smaller relative reductions in risk. For example, while annual damages to coastal property from sea level rise and storm surge, assuming no adaptation, are projected to range in the tens to hundreds of billions of dollars by the end of the century under RCP8.5, mitigation under RCP4.5 is projected to avoid less than a quarter of these damages.2,5,82 However, the avoided impacts beyond 2100 are likely to be larger based on projected trajectories of sea level change.19,20,27

The marginal benefit, equivalently the avoided damages, of mitigation can be expressed as the social cost of carbon (SCC). The SCC is a monetized estimate of the long-term climate damages to society from an additional amount of CO2 emitted and includes impacts that accrue in market sectors such as agriculture, energy services, and coastal resources, as well as nonmarket impacts on human health and ecosystems.84,85 This metric is used to inform climate risk management decisions at national, state, and corporate levels.86,87,88,89,90 Notably, estimating the SCC depends on normative social values such as time preference, risk aversion, and equity considerations that can lead to a range of values. In recognition of the ongoing examination about existing approaches to estimating the SCC,91,92,93 a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report94 recommended various improvements to SCC models, including that they 1) be consistent with the current state of scientific knowledge, 2) characterize and quantify key uncertainties, and 3) be clearly documented and reproducible.

Although uncertainties still remain, advancements in climate impacts and economics modeling are increasingly providing new capabilities to quantify future societal effects of climate change. A growing body of studies use and assess statistical relationships between observed socioeconomic outcomes and weather or climate variables to estimate the impacts of climate change (e.g., Müller et al. 2017, Hsiang et al. 20173,95). In the United States, in particular, the rise of big data (large volumes of data brought about via the digital age) and advanced computational power offer potential improvements to study climate impacts in many sectors like agriculture, energy, and health, including previously omitted sectors such as crime, conflict, political turnover, and labor productivity. Parallel advancements in high-resolution integrated assessment models (those that jointly simulate changes in physical and socioeconomic systems), as well as process-based sectoral models (those with detailed representations of changes in a single sector), enable impact projections with increased regional specificity, which across the modeling frameworks shown in Table 29.1 reveal complex spatial patterns of impacts for many sectors. For example, this spatial variability is consistently observed in the agriculture sector,2,5,96,97 where the large number of domestic crops and growing regions respond to changes in climate and atmospheric CO2 concentrations in differing ways. As such, the benefits of mitigation for agriculture can vary substantially across regions of the United States and summing regional results into national estimates can obscure important effects at the local level.